'Days of Future Passed' with the Moody Blues July 10

Wednesday

Jul 5, 2017 at 9:00 AMJul 5, 2017 at 1:26 PM

By Ed Symkus, Correspondent

The Moody Blues first played Boston almost a half-century ago, down in the cavernous room known as the Psychedelic Supermarket. They were promoting their then-new album “In Search of the Lost Chord.” They’ve returned to the area many times since, but when they take the stage of Blue Hills Bank Pavilion July 10, it will be in celebration of their first album, the now-50-year-old “Days of Future Passed,” which featured both “Nights in White Satin” and “Tuesday Afternoon.”

Though they won’t be traveling with a full orchestra, as was featured on the album, when they play it from beginning to end they’ll be performing live to digital orchestral accompaniment. Among the musicians onstage will be three who have been with the band since that album was released: singer-guitarist-writer Justin Hayward, singer-bassist-writer John Lodge, and singer-drummer-writer Graeme Edge.

Lodge, 71, who composed, among other memorable Moodies tunes, “Ride My See-Saw” and “I’m Just a Singer (in a Rock and Roll Band)” spoke about the band and the music by phone from a tour stop in Austin.

Growing up in Birmingham, England, Lodge admitted that he wasn’t much interested in music, at least not until he was about 11 and saw the movie “Blackboard Jungle,” which featured Bill Haley and His Comets performing “Rock Around the Clock.”

“I was captivated by the absolute energy of rock ’n’ roll,” he said. “Rock ’n’ roll didn’t exist in England at the time, but suddenly people like Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard and Fats Domino showed up. I became totally fascinated with the boogie side of rock ’n’ roll, with the left-hand side of the piano, which was driving [the beat]. By the time I was 13, I’d bought a steel-string guitar, which cost me $5, and I was trying to learn all these boogie moves on the bottom four strings of the guitar. I finally realized that for me, that was where I was at. So I bought a bass guitar.”

Lodge played in a couple of pre-Moodies groups. The first was El Riot and the Rebels, which did covers of American songs, and in which Lodge was a bandmate with future Moody Blue Ray Thomas. Later came The Carpetbaggers, a group that featured some of the first songs Lodge wrote.

Meanwhile, The Moody Blues formed, and Lodge was asked to join. But he was in college at the time.

“I said I’d love to but I first wanted to finish the 18 months I had left in school in order to get my got my equivalent degree in mechanical engineering, because I wanted to design cars,” he said.

During that period, the Moody Blues had their first hit, a cover of the Bessie Banks soul song “Go Now.”

“Then one day Ray Thomas called me and asked if I’d finished college yet,” recalled Lodge. “I said I had and he said, ‘Well then get down to London, right now. [Singer] Denny Laine left the band and [bass player] Clint Warwick left.’ So I went down, and that was it.”

But they needed a new musical direction, as too many other groups in England were playing soul and blues. A discussion with the honchos at Decca records resulted in the suggestion that they should write original lyrics and match them up to the melodies in Dvorak’s “New World Symphony.” Instead the band holed up for a few months in Belgium, intent on writing their own songs and music.

“We were trying to put a stage show together,” said Lodge. “We would write some songs, then rehearse them up, and then we would go into a little club in Belgium and play the songs to an audience as we wrote, and it built up from there.”

It built up into the rock-classical mashup called “Days of Future Passed.”

“That album changed our lives forever,” said Lodge.

For its 50th anniversary tour, which is currently crossing America, the band chose to go the audio-visual route.

“The orchestra will be all digital, we’ll perform live to it, and [a pre-recorded] Jeremy Irons will be up on video screens doing the poems from the album,” said Lodge. “The first part of the show is songs from all our different albums, then we do ‘Days of Future Passed,’ which we finish with a big gong, just like on the album, then we’ll come back on for a couple of encore songs.”

The Moody Blues play at Blue Hills Bank Pavilion in Boston on July 10 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets start at $78. Info: 617-728-1600, livenation.com

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